Friday, March 16, 2007

This can't possibly be true, can it?

I never understood why a person would plagiarize an essay for University -- especially in the era pre-Internet. You still have to read the stuff you steal, right? Why not simply give a day's worth of thought to the stuff you've read and try and do something as weird as, uh, thinking about it?

The Internet changes this dynamic a bit -- you can buy papers wholesale -- but fundamentally, I still don't understand the motivating impulse. Especially if you're this dumb:

The quality of plagiarism is so much less. Students just steal crap off the internet. So it's easier to pass off this low-grade stuff as your own, but it's also so easy to catch people! I personally like it when they leave the hyperlink in the paper.

Dear God in heaven. That sounds like it's awfully common for him, doesn't it? How stupid can you be and still be admitted to post-secondary education?

2 comments:

I once got a math assignment (I was the marker) that was a photocopy of someone else's, with the name (which was on every page) whited out and written over. Of course, you could still read the original writing by looking at the back.

Later, I got two assignments that were completely identical, down to spelling mistakes (hand-written, not hard words, so you'd think one would catch it), that the two students has handed in on top of one another, assuring they would be seen in consecutive order.